Alicia Cowan Travels: Social media workshop in beautiful Paris

This year, I’ve been teaching at Sup de Pub in London. The advertising and communications industry arm of INSEEC – one of the leading French graduate business schools.

I’ve been teaching English speaking French post grads students two classes: Social Networking and Optimising Digital Marketing Performance (how to test and measure your online marketing).

Challenging but fun and a brilliant opportunity for me to share my real life business learnings with them (rather than them learning theory from a text book) while I learn from the Millennial generation what they think about this whole social media lark.

So when I was asked if I wanted to host a special workshop for the students in Paris, I said ‘YES!’

In December, I hopped on the Eurostar to present a two day social media marketing workshop for the 3rd year students studying Brand Strategy in Paris.

Over the two days we covered a huge amount of topics using real business case studies.

Here’s what we covered:

What we mean when we talk about social media in business

The evolution of social media as a two-way communication channel

The importance of community

An in-depth look at the main platforms: Twitter, Facebook, You Tube and LinkedIn. The different cultures, demographics, uses, strategies for using them

When brands get it wrong – some juicy case studies

An in-depth look at blogging

What divides social media failure from success

How to create a social media strategy

There was plenty of interactive learning too with tasks that included writing blog posts and a team assignment to create a social media campaign.

And, among other things, I learnt how to use a French keyboard (I didn’t actually know such a thing existed!)

Here’s a picture of my with some of my lovely students…

While I was there, I got the chance to see Paris by night – something I’d never experienced before. Being December just before Christmas meant it was extra special!

My experience at INSEEC, including the Paris trip has reminded me of one of my all time favourite quotes; ‘to teach is to learn twice’ by French moralist and essayist, Joseph Joubert.

This is one of the reasons I love sharing what I know, and for me his quote is an unwavering reminder to always be listening while doing so, as there is much to learn from everything and everyone.